THE SEA OF LIFE

As we celebrate United Nations World Ocean Day on 8 June, our knowledge of the power and fragility of our oceans still has a long way to go.

- Gillian Burke

I can see the sea!” my brother and I would shout out in unison as we crested the hill at Mariakani, one of the coastal settlements overlooking the port of Mombasa, where the East African coast meets the Indian Ocean. It was that first glimpse of the sea that marked the end of a long journey, and the start of our family holiday.

The journey began in Nairobi, and always before dawn. Our cherry-red Datsun 120Y would be loaded up with bags and sandwiches, headlights on, engine running and my dad, drawing on the first of many cigarettes, would wait impatiently for his bleary-eyed brood to get ready.

This was the early 80s. Kenya, with its post-colonial borders shaping a new national identity, was a young country and we were a young family on a trip to the seaside. The draw was the Indian Ocean. I can still remember how the smell and feel of the air changed as we left the high-altitude city of Nairobi, with its cool, dry atmosphere giving way to the dusty, hot savannah air that, in turn, slowly became warm, humid and salty as we made our gradual descent to the coast.

What I didn’t know then, which I do now, is that on that journey my senses were awakened to an ancient and invisible dance. Powered by the sun, this is a molecular exchange where energy, minerals, nutrients and water are perpetually cycled between the ocean, land, air and all living things. Known respectively as the hydrosphere, geosphere, atmosphere and biosphere, the reality is these realms have no real boundaries and, in the past 30 years or so, scientists studying this ‘dance’ have come to view the Earth as a single system, in which the ocean plays a major part.